• Home

  • Documents

  • Works in Progress · 2020. 11. 18. · 4Underfunded, continued on page 5 4Together, continued on...
14
4 Underfunded, continued on page 5 4 Together, continued on page 7 Works in Progress Advocating for social justice since 1990 Vol 30 July 2020 No. 12 Working people must stand together Marianna Everson I grew up right here in Grays Harbor County, Washington. I am a proud member of the working-class. I come from working-class timber workers. My dad was a log-truck driver and my step-dad a millwright and a saw filer. My grandfather was also a saw filer. I’m a nurse. Our legacy is one of a strong work ethic and solidarity. Our immediate ancestors had jobs with adequate pay and benefits because they fought for it. They or- ganized across languages and differ- ences to win huge gains for working people. 100 years ago, thousands of working people—loggers, mill work- ers, waitresses, longshoremen and more—marched in unity together down the streets of Hoquiam and Aberdeen demanding better pay and better working conditions. At the time, working people were living in terrible housing and working for poverty wages. They gave speeches in different languages because they knew they would be more powerful if they came together across lines of ethnicity and language. They knew, despite differences, that as working people, they were on the same side against the timber barons who pillaged Indigenous lands and made their profit off poor workers’ backs. Together, these workers won historic labor laws that meant many families thrived for a long time here on the Harbor. They showed us that when working people come together and defend one another, we can make a good life possible. We’ve done it before and I believe we must do it again. In my lifetime we have seen life in South- west Washington crumble in many ways. Our small businesses are suffer- ing, our housing is rotting, our worker protections and wages slide to the wayside because corporate executives and their paid politicians have done all they can to fight back the gains working people fought and died for. Both of my father-figures died with nothing to show for a lifetime of work. For a long time, corporate tycoons and the wealthy 1% have spread lies to keep us distracted, di- vided and powerless. They tell us our problems are caused by black people, or immigrants, or poor people. They tell us to be scared. They disorient us so we don’t know which side we’re on any more. And while we’re busy distrusting other working people and competing for scraps, they run off with billions. In recent weeks since the pandemic began, 40 million of us have filed for unemployment while corporate billionaires increased their wealth by over $550 billion. Sunday, I saw some of these lies at work here on the Harbor. I was in Aberdeen on the afternoon of Sunday, June 14, 2020. Sometime in the days leading up to Sunday, a false rumor started that “antifa” was coming to Aberdeen to “riot.” Those false rumors were spread in a coordinated campaign by national white supremacist groups—the exact same language was sent out to small towns all over the country—and not one of them turned out to be true. This is a classic example of a divide- and-conquer lie to keep us scared of each other, and scared of fighting for what we deserve. Still, posts on social media were full of bravado and fear. In reality, a small group of blue collar Harborites had planned a peaceful, silent walk and gather- ing Sunday in support of Black Lives Matter because we know racism ...false rumors were spread in a coordinated campaign by national white supremacist groups—the exact same language was sent out to small towns all over... Health and safety is underfunded— except for the police Bethany Weidner Police department budgets in Thur- ston County’s main cities have been increased year to year. at least for the past few years. Funding for po- lice departments in Olympia, Lacey and Tumwater are now approaching a quarter of the general fund (see chart on page 5). In some cases, the department re- ceived additional roles and responsi- bilities. Tumwater, for example, shift- ed recently its code compliance and enforcement to the police depart- ment. In Olympia, a 2017 increase in the property tax yields $2.8 million in new funds annually, described as needed to pay for downtown walking patrols, neighborhood liaison, coordi- nation with social service providers and additions to the training budget. At the same time as policing in Thur- ston County jurisdictions have seen budget increases, Thurston County’s Public Health and Social Services Department (PHSS) has suffered continual cuts. The department has responsibility to address individual conditions like mental health, home- lessness and addiction with a myriad of other tasks relating to traditional dimensions of public health. As reported in the PHSS current budget analysis: …over time the governmental pub- lic health system has been criti- cally underfunded... Funding has diminished in most of our divisions, reducing our capacity to respond to demand and sustain important health programs. Thurston County has some of the highest rates of adverse childhood experiences (ACE) in Washington state. These indicators are associ- ated with homelessness, single parents, drug, alcohol and firearm use in the home, untreated mental illness, etc. In recent years, the criminal justice system has rec- ognized a direct link between the presence of childhood adversity and adult criminality. PHSS must deal with the con- sequences of a crisis in both homelessness and opioid use in Thurston County. Homelessness increased by 43% in the past year. The number of unsheltered people nearly tripled, posing serious health risks. Lack of affordable housing and increasing poverty is impacting the well-being of the youngest and most vulnerable. A 2019 Youth Health and Equity sur- vey found that depression among Thurston County students exceed- ed the level found across the state; and increased as students got older. In terms of behavioral health, Thurston County lacks sufficient treatment beds—and a fundamen- tal capacity to deal with complex mental health needs. There is a significant increase in the number of children with special health needs and mothers enrolled in the Nurse-Family Partnership program experiencing homelessness, do- mestic violence along with mental health and substance abuse. (PSHH 20-21 Budget Request) These conditions, showing up -- The bias in favor of funding the police instead of public goods and services shows up in many places. Armed individuals and organized militia groups have attended the otherwise peaceful gatherings in Grays Harbor County since the murder of George Floyd. Photo by Ann Valentine.

Works in Progress · 2020. 11. 18. · 4Underfunded, continued on page 5 4Together, continued on page 7 Works in Progress Advocating for social justice since 1990 Vol 30 July 2020

  • Upload
    others

  • View
    2

  • Download
    0

Embed Size (px)

Citation preview

  • 4Underfunded, continued on page 5

    4Together, continued on page 7

    Works in ProgressAdvocating for social justice since 1990

    Vol 30 July 2020 No. 12

    Working people must stand togetherMarianna Everson

    I grew up right here in Grays Harbor County, Washington. I am a proud member of the working-class. I come from working-class timber workers. My dad was a log-truck driver and my step-dad a millwright and a saw filer. My grandfather was also a saw filer. I’m a nurse. Our legacy is one of a strong work ethic and solidarity.

    Our immediate ancestors had jobs with adequate pay and benefits because they fought for it. They or-ganized across languages and differ-ences to win huge gains for working people. 100 years ago, thousands of working people—loggers, mill work-ers, waitresses, longshoremen and more—marched in unity together down the streets of Hoquiam and Aberdeen demanding better pay and better working conditions. At the time, working people were living in terrible housing and working for poverty wages. They gave speeches in different languages because they knew they would be more powerful if they came together across lines of ethnicity and language.

    They knew, despite differences, that as working people, they were on the same side against the timber barons who pillaged Indigenous lands and made their profit off poor workers’ backs. Together, these workers won historic labor laws that meant many families thrived for a long time here on the Harbor.

    They showed us that when working people come together and defend one another, we can make a good life possible. We’ve done it before and I believe we must do it again. In my lifetime we have seen life in South-west Washington crumble in many ways. Our small businesses are suffer-ing, our housing is rotting, our worker protections and wages slide to the wayside because corporate executives and their paid politicians have done all they can to fight back the gains working people fought and died for.

    Both of my father-figures died with nothing to show for a lifetime of work. For a long time, corporate tycoons and the wealthy 1% have spread lies to keep us distracted, di-vided and powerless. They tell us our problems are caused by black people, or immigrants, or poor people. They tell us to be scared. They disorient us so we don’t know which side we’re on any more. And while we’re busy distrusting other working people and competing for scraps, they run off with billions. In recent weeks since the pandemic began, 40 million of us have filed for unemployment while corporate billionaires increased their wealth by over $550 billion.

    Sunday, I saw some of these lies

    at work here on the Harbor. I was in Aberdeen on the afternoon of Sunday, June 14, 2020. Sometime in the days leading up to Sunday, a false rumor started that “antifa” was coming to Aberdeen to “riot.”

    Those false rumors were spread in a coordinated campaign by national white supremacist groups—the exact

    same language was sent out to small towns all over the country—and not one of them turned out to be true.

    This is a classic example of a divide-and-conquer lie to keep us scared of each other, and scared of fighting for what we deserve. Still, posts on social media were full of bravado and fear. In reality, a small group of blue collar Harborites had planned a peaceful, silent walk and gather-ing Sunday in support of Black Lives Matter because we know racism

    ...false rumors were spread in a coordinated campaign by national white supremacist groups—the exact same

    language was sent out to small towns all over...

    Health and safety is underfunded—except for the policeBethany Weidner

    Police department budgets in Thur-ston County’s main cities have been increased year to year. at least for the past few years. Funding for po-lice departments in Olympia, Lacey and Tumwater are now approaching a quarter of the general fund (see chart on page 5).

    In some cases, the department re-ceived additional roles and responsi-bilities. Tumwater, for example, shift-ed recently its code compliance and enforcement to the police depart-ment. In Olympia, a 2017 increase in the property tax yields $2.8 million in new funds annually, described as needed to pay for downtown walking patrols, neighborhood liaison, coordi-nation with social service providers and additions to the training budget.

    At the same time as policing in Thur-ston County jurisdictions have seen budget increases, Thurston County’s Public Health and Social Services Department (PHSS) has suffered continual cuts. The department has responsibility to address individual conditions like mental health, home-lessness and addiction with a myriad of other tasks relating to traditional dimensions of public health.

    As reported in the PHSS current budget analysis:…over time the governmental pub-lic health system has been criti-cally underfunded... Funding has diminished in most of our divisions,

    reducing our capacity to respond to demand and sustain important health programs.

    Thurston County has some of the highest rates of adverse childhood experiences (ACE) in Washington state. These indicators are associ-ated with homelessness, single parents, drug, alcohol and firearm use in the home, untreated mental

    illness, etc. In recent years, the criminal justice system has rec-ognized a direct link between the presence of childhood adversity and adult criminality.

    PHSS must deal with the con-

    sequences of a crisis in both homelessness and opioid use in Thurston County. Homelessness increased by 43% in the past year. The number of unsheltered people nearly tripled, posing serious health risks. Lack of affordable housing and increasing poverty is impacting the well-being of the youngest and most vulnerable. A 2019 Youth Health and Equity sur-vey found that depression among Thurston County students exceed-ed the level found across the state; and increased as students got older. In terms of behavioral health,

    Thurston County lacks sufficient treatment beds—and a fundamen-tal capacity to deal with complex mental health needs. There is a significant increase in the number of children with special health needs and mothers enrolled in the Nurse-Family Partnership program experiencing homelessness, do-mestic violence along with mental health and substance abuse.

    (PSHH 20-21 Budget Request)

    These conditions, showing up

    --

    The bias in favor of funding the police instead of public goods and services shows up in many places.

    Armed individuals and organized militia groups have attended the otherwise peaceful gatherings in Grays Harbor County since the murder of George Floyd. Photo by Ann Valentine.

  • 2 Works In Progress July 2020

    Unintended consequences

    Not all unintended consequences are alikeIt’s no surprise that we live in a world of unintended consequences. Yet we rarely stop to think that our very existence as humans is noth-ing but the result of a long chain of events in the material world which, combined with the laws of evolu-tion on our planet, and with no specific intention in mind, gener-ated humanity.

    This realization may cause discom-fort to those who see themselves as the end result of some plan of conceived by nature, a creator, or the procreating intentionality of the human species. But nature, be-ing nature, does not plan anything. It exists according to the laws and processes of its being, of which we humans are also part. This is the first unintended consequence we as humans must face, and it is a fortunate one, because this knowl-edge offers us the opportunity to be free, to determine our course of action and our future based on our convictions, without the tutelage of extraterrestrial elements or even other terrestrial ones.

    THINKING OUT LOUD Not all unintended consequences are alike: The case of climate changeTaking into consideration the current conditions of the planet (according to scientists, we have already surpassed four of the nine barriers in our biosphere neces-sary to ensure a safe existence for humanity), climate change consti-tutes the most crucial unintended consequence of our time.

    However, this affirmation merits a historical clarification. In gen-eral terms it is accurate to accept climate change as an unintended outcomeof the so-called “insanity of the growth society,” grounded in economic expansionism, accumu-lation and consumerism.

    Early warnings about this condi-tion date back at least to 1972 with the Report to the Club of Rome (an international organization integrat-ed by heads of state—former and current, UN bureaucrats, diplomats, scientists, economists and business leaders) that tried to alert the world to this issue: “Exponential growth is incompatible with a finite world and […] our capacity for consump-tion must not exceed the biosphere capacity for regeneration.”

    Some turn out to be inevitableFifty-two years later, as we wit-ness the systematic and deliberate neglect of the ecological conse-quences of capitalist develop-ment—the heavy dependence of the world economy on the use of fossil fuels. The result is dangerous concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which in turn strengthen the greenhouse effect, posing serious threats to the planet and the survival of civilization. It feels naïve to characterize these results as the unintended conse-quences or the “externalities” of capitalist production.

    In fact, we are witnessing the inev-itable consequences of an economy

    oriented towards the global elite’s systemic greed for profits. We have to call our current condition the expected consequences demanding our immediate action if we aspire to survive.

    A single spark can start a prairie fire: 8 minutes and 46 secondsThe better example of truly unin-tended consequences is the prairie fire of outrage fueled by ongoing state sanctioned police brutal-ity, and ignited by the murder of George Floyd. The magnitude of the response to institutionalized racism in the US has transcended the perimeters of the Black Lives Matter movement, evolving into a multi-racial, international move-ment of protest around the world.

    At the time of this writing, the movement is far from over. It continues to grow both in number and in political clout, demanding specific measures aimed at rede-signing police, thereby challenging one of the ominous and repres-sive state apparatus aimed against black people. This newspaper pays tribute to all the black lives taken by the police, and to the perma-nent struggle for the elimination of racism and economic exploitation against any human being.

    The limits of our imagination?Leading into this historical mo-ment, Fredric Jameson’s argu-ment that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” was hard to refute. Now, as the phrase “defund the police” gets debated and discussed, and examples like Camden NJ are cited, perhaps we will prove Jame-son wrong. Perhaps an unintended consequence of the Black Lives Matter movement, turned now into an international movement, will be a shift in our collective imagina-tion. —EQ

    UPCOMING THEMESAugust: When money is the measure. Do you spend more at Walmart because stuff is cheaper? Can we afford to measure a college educa-tion by anything other than how it will increase our job and earning prospects? Do businesses pay their workers less than a living wage be-cause to do otherwise would make them unprofitable? How should we value old trees vs new develop-ments? Send us your thoughts on these and any other money topics. Deadline: July 16.

    September: Hoping, doping, cop-ing & shopping. A recent book says that people are reaching for one of these strategies to survive in today’s economy. That public in-stitutions are falling apart; bosses are overwhelmed or incompetent; businesses are dysfunctional. Do you find any of this to be true? Do you need a strategy? Deadline: August 15.

    October: The struggle for justice. WIPs mission is to contribute to the struggle for justice across economic, social, political and environmental realms and to the expansion of participatory de-mocracy across classes, races and genders. October 2020 marks the 30th year that Works in Progress has been trying to live up to that mission, as a publication produced and distributed by volunteers. The paper has shaped and reshaped itself across the years, depending on who puts in the time and en-ergy to make it happen. We invite anyone who has read, contributed to or helped produce the paper to send their memories, critiques, old copies, artifacts etc. that have been part of WIP on its journey. Be sure to save the date for an anniversary celebration Nov. 21. Copy deadline for October issue: September 13

    Inside...Working people must stand together .............................................1Health and safety is underfunded—except for the police .......1Not all unintended consequences are alike ................................. 2What is social housing? ........................................................................ 3Books to Prisoners awarded a Sustaining Fund spring grant . 3Olympians want their City to address police misconduct .................................................................4Olympia bans use of tear gas—for a while ................................... 6A question about cops and steroid use .......................................... 6“Law and order” and the role of the police .....................................7Make Juneteenth a national legal holiday ...................................8A timeline history of Juneteenth ......................................................8Return of the “outside agitator” ...................................................... 10How the new faces of facism hide the old rhetoric ................. 11Defunding the police—interview with Angela Davis ............. 11The lessons of the Wynoochee River Dam ...................................12More than marching: creative support for BLM .......................13Spotlight ..................................................................................................15

    Works in Progress (WIP), is a community newspaper based in Olympia WA, that has been pub-lished monthly since 1990.

    WIP’s mission is to contribute to the struggle for justice across economic, social, environmen-tal and political realms, and to expand participatory democracy across classes, races, and genders.

    Editorial policyOur priority is to focus on sto-ries that are ignored or misrep-resented in the media, especially those that relate directly to our mission. We seek well-researched news stories, serious analyses of issues confronting our communities and account of personal experiences or reflections by local writers. We encourage articles that relate to the monthly theme, but material on other topics is also welcome.

    Informed opinion pieces are accepted when accompanied by facts, examples, and sources. We discourage writing where a key point is stated as fact when it’s unproven or in serious dispute. Writing that stereotypes groups or categories of people won’t be accepted.

    Once we receive a submission, we may choose to publish it or not. While the views expressed in the material we print are those of the author alone, WIP aims to print material that is consistent with our mission. WIP reserves the right to edit all submissions for accuracy, length, and clar-ity of expression. We will work with authors if there is a need for editing that extends beyond those areas.

    Unless copyrighted by the au-thor, all original material printed in WIP under Creative Com-mons license CC-BY-NC-ND.

    Workers in ProgressPublishing Committee Emily Lardner, Lori Lively, Kevin Pestinger, Enrique Quintero, Bethany Weidner

    Treasurer Ann Vandeman

    Managing Editor Bethany Weidner

    Associate Editor Lori Lively

    Editing Hanna Broback

    Production & Design Lee Miller

    Art & Photography Lindsey Dalthorp, Richie Ohlson, Ricky Osborne, Paul Peck, Lori Lively

    Proofreaders Fred Silsby, James O’Barr, Scott Yoos, Matt Crichton, Janet Jordan

    Distribution Kevin P, Dave Groves, Mike Pelly, Scott Yoos, Sandia Slaby, Ellen Shortt, Baxter Lee, Carl Eugene Stroud

    Website Carolyn Roos, Heather Sundean

    Social Media Heather Sundean

    Tech guru Lohen Che’

    Advertising Rates$10 per column inchBusiness card $25/30Quarter page $160Discounts for 6-12 months

    Contact WIP: [email protected] or PO Box 295, Olympia, WA 98507 by snail mail, comment or donate at our website: www.olywip.org

    w

  • July 2020 Works In Progress 3

    More ways to get WIP

    YOU WRITE TO WIP

    What is social housing?Dear Editor,

    I am a faithful reader but could not find a definition of “social hous-ing,” which occurred in a number of articles. If you or one of your staff could offer a definition, I’d be much obliged.

    As a retired fishery biologist, I write to those in power about cli-mate change, but the current crisis has opened my eyes to the broader range of interrelated issues we must address. Thanks for any help you can offer.

    Joe Hiss

    Dear Joe,

    Social housing is basically afford-able housing. That’s because it’s housing protected in some way from the swings of the market-place—and the power of investors. Often “social housing” refers to rental housing that’s owned and managed by the state or non-profit organizations or a combination of the two. There is usually some kind of means test.

    The Thurston Housing Authority owns housing units and makes them available to low income families. Across the state, vari-

    ous nonprofit agencies manage subsidized apartment complexes. Yakima farmworkers have access to some government assisted housing, but others have to live in housing provided by farm owners.

    There are also trust and co-oper-ative arrangements for housing priced according to a standard of affordability or cost. These arrange-ments allow for accumulation of equity, but at the end of a tenure, the departing resident gets their eq-uity plus accumulated interest. The dwelling doesn’t go on the market, but reverts to the trust or co-op so that it remains within reach of families who rely on salaries and

    wages for a living. An example of trust-structured housing is Lopez Community Land Trust.

    In Olympia, a local group just started the Thurston Community Land Trust with the goal of acquir-ing housing to manage outside the market. Woodward Lane Co-hous-ing in Olympia is an example of an-other alternative to market-driven housing. Some cities have created programs to offer qualified buyers access to dwelling units protected from market forces. Cambridge MA has such a program. We don’t know of any in Washington.

    The Editors

    Then this happened......workers who struck for better protection in the Yakima apple sheds have died from COVID 19. The deaths came after a historic strike where the workers gained an agreement from management to improve conditions and wages... but too late for some.

    ...ouch! It turns out that the poorest 20% of Washingtonians pay 17.8% of their income while the richest 1% pay 3% of theirs. Since half of our state budget comes from sales tax, the shut down looks to drop revenue by $4.5 billion this year. Maybe we should bump up the tax contribution of the 13 Washing-tonians whose combined wealth is $441 billion? A 1% tax on their stocks & bonds over $1 billion would bring in $4.4 billion - just about enough to wipe out the deficit.

    ...WIPs story about rent reform was confirmed when the Fed painted

    a grim view for the economy: un-employment will remain elevated for years, undermining the health of cities and towns as people are unable to pay rent and other basic expenses.

    ...Thurston, we have a problem. Recent data from the WA Assn. of Sheriffs & Police Chiefs shows that our public safety officers jailed blacks at 5.9 times the rate of the white population in 2019. 13.3% of the average daily jail population consisted of black people, even though they represent only 2.7% of the population in Thurston County.

    ...oops—Transmountain pipeline spilled 50 gallons of oil just across the Canadian border. It’s the 80th spill since the pipeline began oper-ating in defiance of opposition by the Tsleil-Waututh Nation.

    Books to Prisoners awarded a Sustaining Fund spring grantDesdra Dawning

    In the spring and fall each year the Community Sustaining Fund (CSF) accepts applications for grants up to $1000 for projects meeting certain criteria intended to fulfill its mission. Usually, around 6-10 individuals or groups apply for grant funding for their projects each cycle, held twice a year.

    The Spring Grant Cycle this year fell in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. The leadership team for CSF met and agreed by consensus that the focus for funds should be on work in our community that aimed to address this global health crisis.

    Books to Prisoners (BTP), an orga-nization that sends books to prison inmates around the country, was awarded a Spring cycle grant. Work at the Olympia chapter of BTP is handled totally by volunteers. A social change aspect of their work

    centers around their efforts to give marginal communities the opportunity to ask for, and have their needs met. With the current political strife taking place not only in the US but globally, their work also addresses the systemic issues of mass incarceration in our prison system, especially the dispropor-tionate number of black people imprisoned.

    Prisoners who have access to this program can request specific books or simply receive 3-4 books select-ed by the organization. These often serve as a lifeline to the outer world. If a specific book is request-ed, volunteers do their best to find that book, or something similar, sometimes paying for a book from their own pocket. The only books they don’t send are ones that pro-mote white supremacy and racism.

    Their funding comes primarily through yard sales and benefits, with some books collected at Dumpster Values in downtown

    Olympia. Due to the pandemic, they have not been able to bring in the money needed to pay the mail-ing costs.

    Because the work they are doing for our community was deemed very valuable, because they hum-bly asked for even less than the grant limit and because there were no other eligible applicants during this grant cycle, it was decided to award Books to Prisoners the full amount possible—$1,000, with the stipulation that $250 of the amount be set aside to purchase specific books not available from their book stockpile.

    The small number of applicants for the 2020 spring grant cycle may have occurred due to a technical glitch and as a result of these dif-

    ficult times. In order to maintain physical distancing, all CSF meet-ings have been handled through Zoom, including grant interviews. Remaining funds from this cycle will be added to whatever comes to the Sustaining Fund from the “Round Up at the Register” option at the Olympia Food Co-op. Look for an announcement of the Fall grant cycle here in Works in Prog-ress, or on the CSF webpage.

    You can find details about the Sustaining Fund and its mission, or make a donation via PayPal at www.oly-wa.us/csf. Donations can also be made by check mailed to 2103 Harrison Ave NW #2715. Olympia WA 98502.

    Desdra Dawning is an active member of the Olympia Food Co-op.

    This month Works in Progress debuts new Instagram and Twit-ter accounts with hyper-local coverage of the vibrance and diversity of our community’s nature, art, food and agriculture, volunteerism, political actions, and other important events that occur between issues of the paper.

    For expanded coverage of local calendar events, see our inter-active calendar page at olywip.org/calendar, co-hosted by LocalMotive.org, a resource for South Sound citizen engage-ment. To add a listing, go to

    https://localmotive.org/how-to-send-us-a-link-to-your-google-calendar/.

    Works in Progress Olympia’s facebook page has also been updated with more links, new graphics and information on current local happenings. If you haven’t already, “like” us to see our posts on your newsfeed.

    Have a social media tip? Contact Heather Sundean, WIP’s social media maven, at [email protected] and in the meantime, fol-low us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram @ OlyWIP!

    Deborah Sioux Cano Lee, Noel Parrish and Beverly Farris perform a Native American cleansing ceremony as part of a Juneteenth silent vigil on the Fourth Avenue Bridge in Olym-pia on June 19 with Sky Cosby looking on. The ceremony raises a prayer for peace and justice and land acknowledgement. The Olympia event was one of hundreds taking place around the country in recognition of a date connected to the end of slavery and the beginning of the ongoing struggle for equality. See the story on Page 9. Photo by Ricky Osborne

    About the cover

    http://www.oly-wa.us/csfhttps://localmotive.org/how-to-send-us-a-link-to-your-google-calendar/https://localmotive.org/how-to-send-us-a-link-to-your-google-calendar/https://localmotive.org/how-to-send-us-a-link-to-your-google-calendar/mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]

  • 4 Works In Progress July 2020

    Olympians want their City to address police misconductHundreds of citizens

    [Note: Hundreds of people contacted their mayor to demand removal of Olympia police officers who thanked a group of armed men organized to “defend” a gun store and cited state laws against allowing gun-wielding individuals to intimidate citizens. Many messages described situations where police intervention made situations worse, listed desired reforms, and called for shifting funds from police to social services.]

    Dear Mayor,

    In light of the recent protests across the nation in the name of George Floyd and many others who died at the hand of police, I would like to request that the City of Olympia defund the Olympia Police Department.

    I am also requesting that the Mayor’s office demilitarize the city’s police. In addition to reduc-ing their access to military weap-onry of all kinds, I would like the Mayor to ban the use of less than lethal weapons like flash balls, rub-ber bullets, tear gas or choke holds of any kind by the city’s police department on citizens peacefully protesting or otherwise.

    F

    We are calling for the immediate firing of Officer Tiffany Coates. This is the appropriate and fair response to her posing for a photo with a known white suprema-cist militia while the citizens of Olympia, whom she has sworn to protect and serve, are living under threat from these same groups. At best she displayed a lack of sound judgement and at worst, she has unabashedly shown us what she truly believes in, which puts all Black, Brown, Indigenous, and POC residents of Olympia in im-mediate and imminent danger.

    However, we know that this is not an isolated incident. Andre Thompson and Bryson Chaplin and their families are still waiting for justice. The family of Yvonne McDonald is still waiting for justice. We demand Officer Ryan Donald be fired. It is unconscio-nable that he is still on the streets. We demand that the information requests from the family of Yvonne McDonald be honored and filled and that her death be covered up no longer. .

    F

    At 17, [my first boyfriend] broke into a nearby home for the sole purpose of stealing alcohol. The noise frightened the [homeowner] and his family, who called the police. My boyfriend was appre-hended without a hair on his head harmed. It was the scandal of the summer for us nerdy teens, but he ended up only serving a few weekends in juvie and doing a fair amount of community service. No one wanted his grades or his bright future harmed, and the next year he headed off to a prestigious col-lege, his record expunged. It was, overall, a reasonable response to a kid stealing alcohol.

    It’s a story I hadn’t thought about in years, but it’s been on my mind lately. My ex is white. His experi-ence of breaking and entering a house to steal alcohol was wildly different from

    the experiences of Chaplin and Thompson, whose crime was shop-lifting alcohol.Chaplin and Thomp-son deserved for the justice system to treat them as gently as it did my friend. They did not deserve to be chased by police, shot (along with some nearby apartment buildings, as I understand the officer’s aim was terrible), dragged through a media circus, and then imprisoned for something that a white teen-ager was barely punished for. How the officers handled that incident is shameful, as is the fact that the involved officers were not fired.

    F

    I don’t know if [Officer Coates] and the other officer attending [the group of armed men] should be fired or not... However, it is hard for me to believe that she was that ignorant of what she was doing because that would indicate a gross level of misunderstanding of who these people are. If OPD does not know what the 3% symbolizes your office and the chief of police have more serious issues to deal with than a grossly misinformed uniform cop. If she in fact did know what these folks represent, she and her fellow officer probably do need to go.

    F

    I learned last week of an armed militia group, welcomed by our own Olympia PD, congregating in our community in order to “protect” us. The day before, my 14-year-old daughter, passionate about the Black Lives Matter move-ment, demonstrated peacefully with her friend for three hours on the corner of Harrison and Plym-outh. I felt a huge sense of pride and also very safe knowing she was in our Southwest Olympia neighborhood, a place where her passion for equal rights would be met with mostly honks and positiv-ity.

    If my daughter had asked to dem-onstrate on the day this armed militia group was in our neigh-borhood, there is absolutely no way I would have allowed her to

    go. What am I supposed to tell her? Should I tell her that her first amendment right is void and her voice should be silent if someone who disagrees with her is present with an automatic rifle or weapon?

    Should I tell her that it doesn’t matter if she asks the police to protect her first amendment right, because the police invited this group to come to our community and instill fear?. Unfortunately, this is how I have to explain it. Mayor Selby, this is a very difficult thing to tell someone so young and full of passion.

    Every day I work with people around issues of trauma. I know that crime, addiction, domestic violence and abuse are products of generational, systematic and insti-tutionalized violence. In order for our community to become stron-ger and healthier we need creative and trauma-informed responses that address some of the real problems: generational poverty, systematic racism and blatant dis-regard for black, brown and Indig-enous lives, a broken health care system, the war on drugs and its legacy, and a lack of investment in services that support and improve community health and wellness.

    This is a very important moment. You have an opportunity to make a real difference. I urge you to advo-cate for a budget that reflects the needs and priorities of our com-munity. I urge you to advocate for a reallocation of funds away from policing and towards social pro-grams and resources that support housing, jobs, education, health care, child care, mental health, and public health.

    I also want [you] to address the issue of the legitimately terrifying militia of white men ..with long guns, bullet proof vests and ammo strapped to their chests who have been walking in groups through my neighborhood. I have seen them all over downtown.

    -F

    Olympians want misconduct addressedPolicy changes advocated in messages to the city1) Ban the use of knee holds,

    chokeholds and other lethal holds

    2) Adopt a Use of Force Con-tinuum with at least six lev-els of steps and clear rules on escalation

    3) Provide for denial of recer-tification credentials when it is determined that an officer’s use of force was unwarranted under federal guidelines

    4) Make officer misconduct in-formation and disciplinary histories available for public scrutiny

    5) Establish a Citizen’s Re-view Board with author-ity to review agreements between the police guild and sergeants and the City in order to hold the police department accountable and reestablish trust with the public.

    6) Study and implement bud-get alternatives for public safety. Hire and deploy social workers, media-tors, addiction specialists with salaries and working conditions appropriate to performing roles previously belonging to police

    You’re under arrest! Oops, no, I mean “thank you!”

    State RCW 38.40.120 forbids unauthorized groups to “associ-ate themselves together as a military company or organize or parade in public with fire-arms. Any person participat-ing in any such unauthorized organization shall be guilty of a misdemeanor

    ”RCW 9.41.270 outlaws the carrying of any weapon “ap-parently capable of produc-ing bodily harm, in a manner, under circumstances, and at a time and place that either manifests an intent to intimi-date another or that warrants alarm for the safety of other persons. Any person violating the provisions of this subsec-tion above shall be guilty of a gross misdemeanor and if con-victed shall lose their license to carry a concealed weapon.

    We have a problem in Olympia, and we are in serious trouble. Our police department has been hit with two scandals this week: hav-ing a smiling officer pose with an anti-government armed militia group (the 3 Percenters) that was requested by a business owner to protect them from Black Lives Mat-ter protestors… then allegedly she and her partner thanked them for showing up to support the police.4Misconduct, continued on next page

  • July 2020 Works In Progress 5

    An open letter to Cheryl Selby, Mayor of Olympia

    Who are the terrorists?Timothy Murphy

    Mayor Selby, your description of the incident wherein protest-ers spray-painted “BLM” on your house as “like domestic terrorism” is a boot in the face to actual vic-tims of domestic terrorism. I mean really and truly, Mayor Selby? Hav-ing your house spray-painted is like the Boston Marathon bombing? Having your house spray-painted is like the Pulse Nightclub mas-sacre? Having your house spray-painted is like a White supremacist murdering Black parishioners in Charleston? You are an elected offi-cial and it matters what words you choose to employ. And the words that you chose have the potential to incite violence.

    What happens if someone decides to murder protesters because the Mayor of Olympia described those protesters as carrying out an action “like domestic terror-ism”? Nothing is “like” domestic terrorism. Vandalism is not com-parable to maimed and murdered bodies. Destruction of property is an inconvenience to capital, not a capitol offense. How could you dare to conflate them? But you did, Mayor Selby.

    Your police force used chemical weapons on protesters: weapons that are banned from use in war-fare under the Geneva Convention! So…

    Who are the terrorists, Mayor Selby? Here’s a hint: they aren’t the fed-up kids spray-painting a rich person’s house.

    Timothy Murphy lives in Tumwater and is a graduate of The Evergreen State College.

    first as adverse health and safety conditions will, if not addressed, predictably lead to serious nega-tive outcomes—including criminal behavior. Those outcomes are here now.

    Elected leaders have chosen not to devote the resources needed to address these conditions directly. They refuse to acknowledge the failure of the market to provide af-fordable housing; the failure of the “community mental health model,” to treat mental illness; to acknowl-edge the way endemic poverty destroys families; to acknowledge that our young people see our pri-orities and question whether they even have a future.

    Instead, more and more funds go to the police to deal with the consequences of these failures and their budgets swell accordingly. Armed police respond to mental health crises at home and on the street. Armed police respond to domestic disputes and arguments.

    Adolescents wandering around at night are considered suspect. The halls of our school are patrolled by

    armed “school resource officers.” Businesses complain that omeless people downtown present difficul-ties, but arresting them cannot solve the problem, so it simply festers. The roster of jail inmates is filled with people arrested for drunken-ness, shoplifting, minor theft, failure to comply, resisting arrest, and so on. The rate of violent crime has actually been diminishing.

    At the same time that we have enlarged the role of armed police officers to respond to social condi-tions that require judgement and understanding, we give police “non-lethal” weapons that turn out to be lethal at times, along with cast-off military armaments and uniforms more suitable for an oc-cupying arm.

    Institutional failings revealed

    by the pandemic shut-down and the death of George Floyd have produced a new awareness and a growing demand for a restructur-ing. The demand to “defund” the police is an urgent one of those. The refrain is repeated: reallo-cate funds away from policing to support affordable housing, fam-ily wage jobs, generous education, affordable childcare, mental health facilities, ready access to health care for everyone.

    The bias in favor of funding the police instead of public goods and services shows up in many places. It is illustrated in how we rely on nonprofits, faith communi-ties, idealistic volunteers to house the homeless, create programs for youth, intervene in crises.

    The bias is illustrated by two funds

    that Olympia put to voters a few months apart. The “Housing Fund” was in the form of a .1% increase in the sales tax, which brought in $1.3 million in 2019, but will rise or fall with tax receipts fall. The “Public Safety Levy,” was an in-crease in property taxes that brings in $2.8 million a year for the police department.

    The bias shows up in smaller details: PHSS anticipates the retirement of some of its leaders in the next biennium but needs resources it doesn’t have for the transition and to provide for train-ing newly hired staff. The Lacey Police Department also needs to address “succession planning” due to anticipated retirements. Its bud-get already provides for three new officers to back fill the retirement positions “for two or three years.”

    As is shown in the accompanying graph, the story of defunding social services and overfunding police services is true across the country. The demand to “defund the police” turns out on examination to be a demand to restore public services that are the basis for reducing the need for policing.

    Bethany Weidner lives in West Olympia and is the volunteer editor of Works in Progress.

    UnderfundedFrom page 1

    Centralia Square Antique Mall

    Directions from OlympiaSouth on Interstate 5Off at Exit 82 (Factory Outlets)East on HarrisonRight on Pearl

    201 S Pearl & Locust

    Open 7 days10am–5pm

    Antiques•Restaurant•Hotel

    It would be easy to claim igno-rance or a rookie mistake by the officer, except that earlier this week, a woman of color alleged that as she was trying to leave a protest, she was arrested and dur-ing processing, an officer ‘joked’ to another “I could put my knee on her…”

    The Olympia Police Department is investigating these incidents, but no one should ever get to investi-gate themselves without adequate community oversight. Whether or not OPD eventually claims it’s just a misunderstanding, people of color do not feel safe; [they] feel like the enemy. When we take steps to make sure that people in our community are not cast as “the enemy,” everyone is safer.

    F

    Olympia likes to think of itself as “exceptional.” But it is not. The OPD is not much different than other police departments. An offi-cer stopped my friend’s mixed-race son with her lights blazing as he was pulling into the parking lot of his apartment. She pulled a gun on him and told him to put his hands up. “What have I done wrong? I don’t want to die!” he said. “One of your headlights was out.” [The boy] never filed a complaint—he didn’t want to call attention to himself —and the incident does not appear in police records. Why would a cop do this? Was she afraid of him because he is mixed race? This kind of out-of-control behavior is common among the OPD. I could cite many, many other examples.

    [These are excerpts from some of the many messages sent to the City. Read the full texts at .www.olywip.org ]

    Police misconductFrom previous page

    233 Division St NW(360) 943-8044

    Wildwood (360) 688-1234

    http://www.olywip.org

  • 6 Works In Progress July 2020

    Banned for use abroad but not at homeThe key ingredient of tear gas is actually a solid powder. To use the gas, you need a dispersal agent, such as the solvent methylene chloride, to carry the particles through the air. A typical tear gas grenade contains a variety of additional chemicals for heat dispersal of the irritant. The grenade can be shot or thrown. The gas recently used against protest-ers is banned in warfare by the 1925 Geneva Protocol. The US signed the ban with the reservation that they could continue to use the gas against their own civilians.

    Beyond causing pain in people’s eyes tear gas can do other significant harm to a person’s body: “Tear gas is most often associated with making people’s eyes stream with tears. But tear gas actu-ally affects many parts of the body, and can cause vomiting, digestive problems, respira-tory problems, skin irritation and burns. In severe cases, it can contribute to asphyxiation and heart attacks. It has also been linked to miscarriages and higher rates of cancer.” Anna Feigenbaum, author of Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of WWI to the Streets of Today

    Olympia bans use of tear gas—for a whileMindy Chambers

    [Ed note: The police union and city attorney in Seattle said new laws banning chokeholds and crowd-control weapons like tear gas are “safety issues” that must be bargained.]

    The use of chemical weapons for crowd control no longer will be an option, at least for now, for the Olympia Police Department and for the Washington State Patrol offi-cers who work in the state Capitol.

    Olympia police used chemical devices to scatter protestors during recent demonstrations in down-town Olympia in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The policies and protocols for their use, the number of devices used and the cost to city taxpayers were requested from the city, but were not immediately available.

    The Olympia City Council voted unanimously to ban the use of pep-per spray, pepper bombs and tear gas at its June 9 meeting, voting on a proposal brought forward by first-year Council member Dani Madrone.

    Such weapons cause people to cough and sneeze, and public health officials around the country have raised concerns regarding the likelihood that use of these devices increases the chances of spreading the COVID-19 virus.

    The ban took effect immediately and will be in place until the end of the pandemic -- broadly defined in Washington state as a time when a vaccine or other treatment for the novel coronavirus is widely available.

    “While this move for immediate action does not reflect the full concerns or the need for account-ability, this is a concrete step that I can attempt this evening,” Madrone said. “We (also) need to assess the tactics of crowd control and determine if we are protecting the safety of those who are exercis-ing their First Amendment rights.” Madrone has requested details on how Olympia police manage protests when what she termed “heavily armed vigilante groups” are present

    She and other Council members have requested extensive informa-tion on police policies regarding

    crowd control, use of force and other practices not readily avail-able to the public. They also raised numerous questions about what they called a lack of Police Depart-ment accountability and transpar-ency. Council member Clark Gil-man cited the upcoming hiring of a new police chief as an opportunity to thoroughly review department operations and examine its budget, which is over $20 million in 2020.

    “Trust … we don’t have a lot. We have to regain it or gain it for the first time,” said Council member Lisa Parshley.

    “Reliance on the old ways and tools [for the Police Department] sty-mies innovation and change and evolution. Can we do this better? Yeah, we can, if it takes elected bodies of government to take away some of those tools so that we have innovation, we have change and evolution, it will happen,” Parshley said.

    Similar bans on the use of chemi-cals for crowd disbursement are in place in Seattle and Portland. On June 12, the Chief of the Wash-ington State Patrol announced its officers also will not be using tear gas on demonstrators during the coronavirus pandemic.

    Mindy Chambers is a 30-year Olympia resident with many years of experience in newspaper and magazine reporting and editing.

    A question about cops and steroid useA reader reports

    Anabolic steroid use by law en-forcement officers has been identi-fied by numerous organizations and researchers as a factor in the increasing aggression and violence of police. Derived from the hor-mone testosterone, steroids have been a controlled substance since 1990, ostensibly available only by prescription.

    Sought for their ability to increase muscle mass and enhance phy-sique, hundreds of brand name steroids are available to those who know how to find them. Injected directly into the muscles, chronic misuse of steroids is associated with increased mood swings, de-pression, impaired judgement, nervousness, extreme irritability, delusions, hostility, and aggres-sion. Steroid abuse among police officers creates what the Drug En-forcement Agency calls an “invin-cible mentality” when performing law enforcement duties.

    In the last decade officers from In-diana, Connecticut, Oregon, Geor-gia, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Florida have been indicted and/or convicted on steroid possession.

    Prompted by the public revelation of illicit steroid use by members of the police and fire departments in 2007, the Phoenix Police Depart-ment commenced random steroid testing of their department. The officer in charge of testing, Kim Humphrey, noted in Police Chief magazine that officers with rage or depression should not be carrying firearms.

    As evidence mounted that steroid use was, in fact, a serious problem, the International Association of Chiefs of Police in 2008 issued a recommendation calling on local

    and state law enforcement agen-cies to create a policy prohibiting steroid use by the LEO community. The resolution was never passed and by 2014, the Phoenix Police Department had ceased steroid testing altogether.

    Rigorous steroid testing has largely been abandoned for three reasons: cost, inability to determine use with testing, and organized resis-tance. The most common steroid testing method costs at least $200 to administer and involves expen-sive chemicals and equipment (as compared to urinalysis for narcotic use at roughly $20 per test). Most police department simply do not have the budgets for more than oc-casional, random tests.

    The second factor is the grow-ing ability of users to mask their steroid use with other substances, which can result in negative or inconclusive tests.

    Other sources suggest that power-

    ful police unions may protect of-ficers from testing. And though the Fraternal Order of Police insists they do not sanction steroid use among police, they also support limiting the use of testing. Even when they are performed and the officer found to be “juicing,” there are no guarantees that convic-tions will not be overturned, fired officers reinstated, or legal conse-quences otherwise nullified.

    Because there is no national standard for testing and no reposi-tory for the collection of data, no one knows for sure how many

    law enforcement officers may use steroids, but in his book Dopers in Uniform, John Hoberman, profes-sor at The University of Texas-Austin, estimates that the number runs into the “tens of thousands.”

    For more information, see Dopers in Uniform: The Hidden World of Police on Steroids by John Hoberman, University of Texas Press.

    https://www.versobooks.com/books/2109-tear-gashttps://www.versobooks.com/books/2109-tear-gas

  • July 2020 Works In Progress 7

    keeps working people powerless, we know police violence happens on the Harbor, and we know that our working class black brothers and sisters stand up for us, so we should stand up with them.

    What we were met with was a large number of people with guns. It is legal to open-carry in Wash-ington, that was not the prob-lem. The problem was that these people have left the side of work-ing people. These people, mostly men, considered us, a group of blue collar people, mostly women, exercising our constitutional rights to speak up for the dignity of all of us, to be so terrifying that they responded with spitting and yell-ing in our faces, threatening us with violence while cradling their weapons, and using racial and gender slurs meant to demean and provoke us.

    This is exactly what the rich and powerful want. They want you and me to be more enraged at other working people demanding basic dignity than we are at them for stealing our dignity in the first place. I’m heartbroken that some of my brothers and sisters have bought the lie.

    As we moved about the town we were followed. We saw the lie rear its head again. I was told that the four men initially following us were coming to confront “antifa.” Two of the four verbally confronted my friend and me insisting, “You have no right to be here.” They seemed genuinely surprised to hear that we are lifelong residents of Grays Harbor County. This is the real foundational issue for me.

    Far too often, we’ve allowed people at the top to exploit any perceived divisions—race, religion, geog-raphy, sex, national origin, and sexual orientation—and where has it gotten us? People are still dying and going bankrupt due to lack of healthcare coverage. There are still not enough affordable homes. Wages haven’t risen in 40 years while the cost of living keeps going up. Black people, Indigenous peo-ple, and poor people are still being killed by police. Workers and poor people still pay a huge percentage of our income to taxes while the wealthy get tax breaks. Our schools still struggle for adequate funding.

    Perhaps it was so hard for these men to believe that we’re from the Harbor because we have forgotten our history. We’ve forgotten that we are a people who fight for each other.

    Let’s remember our proud history as working people, of standing on the same side, defending one an-other. It’s time we stopped taking the bait. It’s time we saw their lies for what they are—games they play to keep us distracted and divided.

    We come from ancestors who stood up for one another and demanded a dignified life for everyone. Now it’s our turn. It’s time we choose to come together on the side of working people and Black work-ing people instead of fighting each other. The struggle of working class black people is my struggle. I know which side I’m on. Do you?

    Marianna Everson, RN, MHP, is a candidate running to represent LD 19, from Aberdeen to the Columbia River. Reach her at mariannaforthepeople.com.

    TogetherFrom page 1

    RETHINKING EVERYTHING: Defunding the police?It turns out that reform hasn’t worked: more training; lethal holds; new guidelines for use-of-force, new leadership; more training. These reforms assume that the police are neutrally enforcing a set of laws that are beneficial to everyone. Instead of questioning the validity of using police to wage an inherently racist war on drugs, advocates of procedural reforms politely suggest that police get anti-bias training, which they will happily deliver for no small fee.

    Have the police do itWhat “procedural justice” leaves out are questions of substantive justice. Over the last 40 years we have seen a massive expansion of the scope and intensity of policing. Every social problem in poor and non-white communities has been turned over to the police to manage. The schools don’t work; let’s create school policing. Mental health services are decimated; let’s send police. Overdoses are epidemic; let’s criminalize people who share drugs. Young people are caught in a cycle of violence and despair; let’s call them superpredators and put them in prison for life.

    Why a “war” on crime?Police have also become more militarized. The Federal 1033 program, the Department of Justice’s “Cops Office,” and homeland security grants have channeled billions of dollars in military hardware into American police departments to advance their “war on crime” mentality. A whole generation of police officers have been given “warrior” training that teaches them to see every encounter with the public as potentially their last, leading to a hostile attitude towards those policed and the unnecessary killing of people falsely considered a threat, such as the 12-year-old Tamir Rice, killed for holding a toy gun in an Ohio park.

    What’s the alternative?The alternative is not more money for police training programs, hardware or oversight. It is to dramatically shrink their function. We must demand that local politicians develop non-police solutions to the problems poor people face. We must invest in housing, employment and healthcare in ways that directly target the problems of public safety. Instead of criminalizing homelessness, we need publicly financed supportive housing; instead of gang units, we need community-based anti-violence programs, trauma services and jobs for young people; instead of school police we need more counselors, after-school programs, and restorative justice programs.

    Let’s build up individuals and the community insteadA growing number of local activists in Minneapolis like Reclaim the Block, Black Visions Collective and MPD 150 are demanding just that. They are calling on Mayor Jacob Frey to defund the police by $45m and shift those resources into “community-led health and safety strategies.” The Minneapolis police department currently uses up to 30% of the entire city budget. Instead of giving them more money for pointless training programs, let’s divert that money into building up communities and individuals so we don’t “need” violent and abusive policing.

    Alex S Vitale is professor of sociology and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College. This is an excerpt from his article in The Guardian, May 31, 2020: “The answer to police violence is not ‘reform.’ It’s defunding.”

    REFLECTION

    “Law and order” and the role of the policeDana Walker

    While corporate criminals de-stroy lives…

    It is estimated by the US Bureau of National Affairs that “…the dollar cost of corporate crime is over twenty times greater than the combined larcenies, thefts, robberies, and burglaries com-mitted by individuals.” These corporate thefts and embezzle-ments ruin millions of lives, and they wreak untold havoc upon stockholders, employees, retir-ees, and the overall economy. These crimes often wipe out the life savings of countless numbers of people, yet they go largely unpunished.

    Large corporations also constant-ly get caught engaging in con-spiracies to commit mass mur-der for profit—the GM ignition switch scandal, the thalidomide scandal, the Ford Pinto explod-

    ing gas tank scandal, on and on—yet the perpetrators of these conspiracies not only suffer no consequences for their horrific crimes but they often get a large bonus.

    Corporate criminals are rarely caught, and when they are caught, they rarely go to prison, and when they go to prison, it is usually for one or two years at a minimum-security ‘coun-try-club’ that does not even have any walls or fences surrounding it.

    Police are tasked to deal with the side effectsIn this hierarchy, the street cop is the equivalent of the garbage man in that they are sent to take care of all the problems that no one else wants to deal with. Cops are constantly con-fronting the very worst that human-ity has to offer and they deal with it day in and day out. Even when they are dealing with otherwise good people, they are often dealing with them at a very bad time.

    I suspect that there are very few

    people who can do that whilst yet maintaining anything close to a healthy mental state. I suspect that most cops must grow a thick shell in order to protect their mental health, in fact. They need to dehumanize people because they deal with so much human misery and suffering on such a regular basis that they can’t allow themselves to see these wretches as ‘people’ lest their hearts totally break.

    Thus they begin to fear and mis-trust the people that they police. They see too much of what goes on behind their closed doors. They find themselves uncomfortable socializing with normal people during their off times because they themselves have become so abnor-mal—and so they begin socializing exclusively with other cops, thus further reinforcing their commu-nity neurosis.

    As their shell thickens, they become ever more out of touch with the world of light and beau-ty. They exist within a highly insulated bubble world that is cyni-cal, cruel, and debased. Since cops must constantly stifle many of their most basic human qualities, only other cops can understand. They hang out exclusively with

    4Law & order, continued on page 9

    https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/a-short-history-of-cops-terrorizing-students/https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/superpredator-myth.htmlhttps://fortune.com/2017/08/29/trump-military-police-equipment-1033-program-obama/https://harvardlawreview.org/2015/04/law-enforcements-warrior-problem/https://www.reclaimtheblock.org/https://www.blackvisionsmn.org/https://www.mpd150.com/https://secure.everyaction.com/eR7GA7oz70GL8doBq19LrA2https://secure.everyaction.com/eR7GA7oz70GL8doBq19LrA2

  • 10 Works In Progress July 2020

    A timber industry strike that echoes today

    Return of the “outside agitator”Aaron Goings

    As millions of people take to the streets to protest racism and police violence, voices of the Right—both its fascist and corporate incarna-tions—cry out to blame a favorite bogeyman, the “outside agitator.”

    Blame it on “outside agitators” No one should be surprised. At nearly every point in American history, racists, bosses, politicians and media personalities have tried to label social justice rebellions as the work of a handful of “outside agitators”— troublemakers look-ing to import chaos to otherwise serene places.

    A list those labeled “outside agita-tors” in the twentieth century reads like a “who’s who” of social movements: much of the Civil Rights Movement (including MLK), the Wobblies, and the 1999 Seattle WTO protestors. “Outside agitators” this spring are in good company.

    Depression in the Pacific NW lumber industryThe Evergreen State has its own history of using this label to sup-press social movements. Readers might hear echoes of a powerful 1935 lumber strike in the media response to today’s uprisings.

    Lumber was the largest and one of the most dangerous industries in the Pacific Northwest. Each day, loggers and mill laborers risked that a falling log, flying cable, or spinning saw might take their life. In his wonderful new book, Radical Seattle: The General Strike of 1919, historian Cal Winslow writes: “Conditions were dangerous in the hills and equally brutal in the mills. There, men and boys worked on and among giant saws, with their deafening noise in air that seemed more sawdust than nitrogen and oxygen.”

    The Depression cut deep into the lumber industry, tossing thou-sands of people out of their jobs. In desperate times, workers had few institutional resources. Cit-ies and charities failed to provide adequate relief. Most lumber work-ers’ unions had been squashed by a combination of state repression, vigilantism, and internal union dissension.

    A new movement leads a fight for better conditionsIn the early 1930s, a new move-ment arose, sparked by the grass-roots activism of Communists, Wobblies, and other labor militants. In many Northwest cities, unions allied with community organiza-tions to press politicians for relief, free milk for schoolchildren and pro-labor legislation

    In the thick of the Great Depres-sion, between 30,000 and 40,000 Pacific Northwest lumber workers struck. They demanded recognition of their industrial union, a 30-hour workweek and increased wages. In May 1935, unionists and their al-lies in Grays Harbor and across the Northwest took to the streets, parading and setting up picket lines no one was allowed to cross.

    Blame “outside agitators” and invite repressionA violent response by the anti-unionist bosses, politicians, cops, and journalists portrayed rank-and-

    file strike activists as Communists and outside agitators. “Red Baiting was raised here in 1935 to such an extent that headlines appeared in London papers branding our Pa-rades as Red Marches,” noted one union publication. A front-page ar-ticle in the Seattle Post–Intelligencer wrote that Washington Governor Clarence D. Martin, a conservative

    Democrat, “served notice today on Communists and agitators that he will not tolerate coercion and intimidation.”

    As we’ve seen in the recent upris-ings, as soon as elites blame pro-tests on “outside agitators,” armed agents of the state join vigilantes to brutalize, jail, even kill those work-ing for change. In a statement that could have come from the twenty-first century, one conservative union leader blamed the spreading strike on a “flying squadron of Red” coming from Portland.

    In 1935, lumber bosses had allies in city halls and the state capitals. To protect property, police round-ed up picketers. Bosses recruited strikebreakers, both on the Harbor and in the wider Pacific Northwest. On May 14, a car driven by scabs ran through a picket line at the Ab-erdeen Plywood factory, seriously injuring one picketer. In July, a Hoquiam scab fired a shotgun into a picket line, wounding four men and a boy.

    The state and National Guard move against the strikersGovernor Martin took an active role in breaking the strike. Us-ing “right to work” rhetoric, he ordered the state patrol to “protect workers” in eastern Grays Harbor, where employers complained that “outsiders” were picketing and threatening scabs. On June 8, the state patrol went to Longview to break a blockade that prevented traffic from entering the Long-Bell and Weyerhaeuser mills. To justify his use of state forces, Martin red- baited the strikers:

    Investigation has revealed such interference and threats come primarily from agitators, includ-ing some professional commu-nists who are taking advantage of the situation to foment discontent and violence. These forces are determined to promote indus-trial trouble even to the extent of undermining our institutions and government. Now, as governor, I serve notice such communistic activities, professional agitation, coercion and intimidation must not be tolerated in Washington.

    In late June, Martin sent the Na-tional Guard to Tacoma to forcibly reopen the mills. They set up a

    machine gun and attacked picket-ing workers with tear gas. Brigadier General Carlos A. Pennington of the Guard banned picketing in Tacoma. The troops made a spate of arrests, interning strikers at the local Armory.

    A couple of weeks later, the Nation-al Guard teargassed 400 picketers

    at the Bay City Lumber Company in Aberdeen, the same mill where, 12 years earlier, a company gun-man murdered a Wobbly striker.

    The violence made a lasting im-print on local workers. Aberdeen unionist Mickey Orton’s descrip-tion of the 1935 attacks could have been written this spring:

    State Highway Patrol and the State Militia were placed at the disposal of the operators and local law enforcement agencies… by the definitely hostile anti-labor state administration of Washing-ton and Oregon. Practically in every instance where the State Highway Patrol and the National Guard were brought into the pic-ture, violence became rampant. Peaceful, striking workers were gassed, beaten, maimed, and injured.

    Vigilantes join in the violenceVigilantes joined police to crush the strike. On July 1, they dyna-mited the home of Frank L. Mor-gan, president of the Grays Harbor Bar Association who was due in court the next day to defend a striker. The blast tore through the first floor but did not harm Morgan or his two daughters who slept in-side. Earlier, in Eureka, California, gunmen had shot and killed two striking lumber unionists, as well as a third man unlucky enough to be in the way of an anti-unionist bullet.

    Significant gains won by timber workersAt the end of four months, lumber workers returned to work, hav-ing carried out one of the Pacific Northwest’s largest strikes, a mas-sive, industry-wide conflict that crippled the largest industry in the region—and brought significant gains for timber workers and their families. Among other gains were higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions.

    The strike also led to a balloon-ing of the region’s timber unions, which by the end of 1935 counted 35,000 thousand members with thousands more joining each month.

    A greater sense of hope and solidarity likewise came with

    the strike. Lumber workers had a better idea of what they could accomplish when joined in com-mon cause. A year after the strike ended, the region’s lumber work-ers formed the Federation of Wood-workers (FOW), with an estimated 100,000 members, making it the largest labor union on the Pacific Coast.

    Those in power will fight movements by inciting violence against “others”Northwest employers never stopped blaming outsiders in their efforts to divide and conquer the labor movement. A few years after the strike, the Business Builders, a far-right organization, claimed outsiders were responsible for labor troubles: “That the loyal citi-zens of Grays Harbor settle their own problems, rather than permit outsiders to come in whose only desire is to establish conditions which can be used as examples for other districts.”

    Call out the “outside agitator” narrative Today’s global demonstrations against police violence and a lum-ber strike 85 years ago aren’t the same. But in both cases, those in power fought movements demand-ing humane treatment for the op-pressed by “othering” the protestors and inciting police violence and vigilantism against them. Bosses, politicians, and militarized police forces will always wage class war from above. Elites know what they’re doing when they employ dishonest “outside agitator” rhetoric.

    The 1935 Pacific Northwest Lum-ber Strike, like practically any grassroots uprising for social jus-tice, is proof that when people take to the streets, those in power will rush to their podiums to announce and denounce the arrival of “out-side agitators.”

    I’ve seen folks on social media mocking politicians and bosses for rolling out this ol’ standby—the outside agitator— to sow dissent among protestors. Keep it up! Re-jecting and calling out the dishon-est “outside agitator” narrative is a step toward countering the power and propaganda of those seeking to quash dissent.

    Aaron Goings is a historian based in Tacoma. His book, The Port of Missing Men: Billy Gohl, Labor, and Brutal Times in the Pacific Northwest will be published by the UW Press this summer.

    4Timber, continued on page 11

  • July 2020 Works In Progress 11

    An exchange between Angela Davis and Amy Goodman

    Defunding the police—it’s about revisioning and building anewAmy Goodman: You write in Freedom Is a Con-stant Struggle, “Neoliberal ideology drives us to focus on individuals, ourselves, individual victims, individual perpetrators. But how is it possible to solve the massive problem of racist state violence by calling upon individual police officers to bear the burden of that history and to assume that by prosecuting them, by exacting our revenge on them, we would have somehow made progress in eradicating racism?” Explain what exactly you’re demanding.

    Angela Davis: Neoliberal logic assumes that the fundamental unit of society is the individual, and I would say the abstract individual. Ac-cording to that logic, Black people can combat racism by pulling themselves up by their own individual bootstraps. That logic recognizes—or fails, rather, to recognize that there are institu-tional barriers that cannot be brought down by individual determination. If a Black person is materially unable to attend the university, the solution is not affirmative action, they argue, but rather the person simply needs to work harder, get good grades and do what is necessary in order to acquire the funds to pay for tuition. Neoliberal logic deters us from thinking about the simpler solution, which is free education.

    Angela Davis: The call to defund the police reflects only one aspect of the process repre-sented by the demand. Defunding the police is not simply about withdrawing funding for law enforcement and doing nothing else.

    It’s about shifting public funds to new services and new institutions—mental health coun-selors, who can respond to people who are in crisis without arms. It’s about shifting funding to education, to housing, to recreation. All of these things help to create security and safety.

    It’s about learning that safety, safeguarded by violence, is not really safety.

    I would say that abolition is not primarily a nega-tive strategy. It’s not primarily about dismantling, getting rid of, but it’s about reenvisioning. It’s about building anew. I would argue that abolition is a feminist strategy. And one sees in these abo-litionist demands that are emerging the pivotal influence of feminist theories and practices.

    What we’re calling for is a process of decrimi-nalization, recognizing that threats to safety, threats to security, come not primarily from what is defined as crime, but rather from the failure of institutions in our country to address issues of health, issues of violence, education, etc. So, abolition is really about rethinking the kind of future we want, the social future, the economic future, the political future. It’s about revolution, I would argue.

    Amy Goodman is the host of Democracy Now, which you can hear locally on KAOS (89.9), KOWA (106.5) or KBCS (91.3) or streaming. The full interview with Angela Davis ran on June 12, 2020.

    PERSPECTIVESophisticated and seductive

    How the old face of fascism hides in the new rhetoricThe image of far-right groups as just hooded Klansmen or goose stepping Nazis is seriously outdated, and dangerously minimizes the real threat of fascism. Banning the KKK to get rid of far-right terrorism is like banning Xerox machines to get rid of copiers. Fascist groups these days don’t just spout racist slurs. They are more so-phisticated, starting with issues you might agree with: anti-corporate free trade, anti-elite corrup-tion, anti-pollution, anti-war, even anti-police! But they use a fake-populist, conspiratorial analysis of how the world works, rather than a real critique of economic hierarchies. Only when they hook in new recruits is their true fascist agenda revealed.

    Fascism and white supremacy are not always the same thingWhite supremacy is an ideology that centers people of European descent of all classes at the top of social hierarchies. Fascism is a far-right revolutionary movement that wants to replace capitalist democracies with extreme authoritar-ian states centered on ultranationalism (of a core racial, ethnic, religious, or state group).

    Not all white supremacists are fascistsWhite supremacy is common in business, gov-ernment, police, political parties, and unions, whether conservative, liberal, or even progres-sive. White supremacy is pervasive and institu-tional, and has been around since colonialism and slavery began. While it’s important that run-of-the-mill racists stand up to fascist/far-right groups, they’re only scratching the surface of the underlying institutional racist systems that give birth to fascism.

    Not all fascists are white supremacistsFascism is a specific movement that started

    in the 20th century—it isn’t just shorthand for any repressive meanie. Fascists can be white American racist militias, but they can also be the Japanese Imperial Army, Latin American or Philippine death squads, Hindutva paramilitaries, Saudi-backed jihadists, or Israeli settler militias. They can even be People of Color in the US who join far-right groups because they’re anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-Native, or anti-leftist. Far-right groups love having token members of color to confuse the public about their true ideology.

    Trump is a racist who’s enabling facism to growFascism today takes different forms, and it goes far deeper than Trump. The fascists might not be the obvious gun-toting “rednecks,” but por-tray themselves as “patriots” or “peacekeepers” who express anger at big government, unem-ployment and repression, and praise “peace-ful protesters” while demonizing leftists or black “separatists.” Dig a little deeper, in their facebook pages, perhaps, and you’ll uncover their racist connections, Christian supremacist beliefs, or violent threats against “un-American” dissenters or noncitizens.

    Don’t be fooled or silencedEducate yourself and friends about the growing threat of fascist militants on our streets. See the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR.org), Southern Poverty Law Cen-ter (splcenter.org), Political Research Associates (politicalresearch.org), Western States Center (westernstatescenter.org), and Research for Progress (researchforprogress.us).

    This editorial analysis was submitted by an astute observer of history and current realities.

    The Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, which tracks white su-premacist and far-right groups, has counted nearly 200 appearances by vigilantes and far-right extremists at protests in the United States over the past few weeks. Alexander Reid Ross, a researcher at the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right and author of Against the Fascist Creep, separately counted scores of such appearances, 12 of which involved police collaboration or support.

    Many officials, including President Donald Trump, have repeatedly blamed protest violence on the anti-fascist movement known as antifa and the “radical left.” But the violence in Albuquerque isn’t the first instance of right-wing vigilantes be-ing criminally charged for actions during recent protests. On June 2, federal pros-ecutors in Nevada charged three members of the Boogaloo movement, which seeks to accelerate the collapse of the political system via civil unrest, with conspiracy to damage and destroy by fire and explo-sives. An Army Reserve member and two military veterans were allegedly headed to downtown Las Vegas with gas canisters and Molotov cocktails. On Tuesday, federal prosecutors in California charged a U.S. Air Force sergeant linked to the Boogaloo with murder for killing a federal security officer near a courthouse in Oakland. He was also charged separately for killing a sheriff’s deputy in Santa Cruz County.

    Excerpted from “Armed vigilantes antagoniz-ing protesters have received a warm reception from police” by Mara Hvistendahl and Alleen Brown. It originally appeared on The Intercept (theintercept.com).

    [Note: Watch this video for a straightforward account of the people who came to intimidate Olympia residents, including their links to other far right organizations and even a politician https://youtu.be/qaJv8k65QCE]

    https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2FIREHR.org%2F%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR3dBCqSSGRikLNKjuS_cDnyLGhcrquwGor4AN_nTxyvkH9Xpx2p5bnkVAE&h=AT1Q0cSuxX6k4EMFnuVF_IgIEgvysKAFJ5F9sMNixrVpItwta0Pls8iVg05q4vNAeC6AqsRH-wTjByQONDNQwgfjXIN1BX69JCye3izN8HhLD-vpK16Xsts7ao8JjXAYMsQM&__tn__=-UK-R&c%5B0%5D=AT2n2guIsrBPeZRZ-jDRyl685k7z14A_aIkup-nH6OY6iM6JozNAUNnpSYwbNiksr-5rSBmE6lsxOh6lmzUlTcNx-N0slMamG3jPyFlbNURX2IG1q5jBBr1hQgiO-zduhouCZDJIAivQWjwhttps://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fsplcenter.org%2F%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR2RDVuTSAfrVjMr2Uf-g5LSdUNIa-zUNUOSR8laEc3WVdcHrPDinoRxZqs&h=AT0T13W58u1j1WHeJ--WOHprvrRe-iowMwibpDi3g2GmfquAf6qq6648wa7kUHDXUpyFYNZD0stxAk4ckiupZ1FWV6FEqpkSn4iyTH5Wl72fR-OM0zg0JAdwA31gtD8CgExx&__tn__=-UK-R&c%5B0%5D=AT2n2guIsrBPeZRZ-jDRyl685k7z14A_aIkup-nH6OY6iM6JozNAUNnpSYwbNiksr-5rSBmE6lsxOh6lmzUlTcNx-N0slMamG3jPyFlbNURX2IG1q5jBBr1hQgiO-zduhouCZDJIAivQWjwhttps://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fpoliticalresearch.org%2F%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR3r4V849JzqT7S_3gtnqhneefCr8tnUIr84_d-0og4ZRayMt3Twf0XPA7Q&h=AT03UwcxAuwtpgUHruO0g1sSNYkF9QWBGmSCW5UJt0d8ehczTlI96i1UgRgG8bxVkT5zgGiki5fI9EvvD2wNq4_VznlEziy8iDDx_5fRQwl9ttpSf8kP_nCsMwVPQKGYOsrO&__tn__=-UK-R&c%5B0%5D=AT2n2guIsrBPeZRZ-jDRyl685k7z14A_aIkup-nH6OY6iM6JozNAUNnpSYwbNiksr-5rSBmE6lsxOh6lmzUlTcNx-N0slMamG3jPyFlbNURX2IG1q5jBBr1hQgiO-zduhouCZDJIAivQWjwhttps://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwesternstatescenter.org%2F%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR2W87U86jrNzw_y3_-URsFWtTNgeTKdZ7Hq8zdJU6aPg0XzCZVVgPFiK1Y&h=AT22JW8cXal6q2k5nIQDiLkAmrIFh5Dlo6v9luNAbxuyBBGBvjf4atBR_FCksnW7O2lzdtQO2kWsMAzg4r1rkPsF0Z3lWYj5BSd1Jqzzm03RKcWOZkw6tcBwpjgxPkfUG126&__tn__=-UK-R&c%5B0%5D=AT2n2guIsrBPeZRZ-jDRyl685k7z14A_aIkup-nH6OY6iM6JozNAUNnpSYwbNiksr-5rSBmE6lsxOh6lmzUlTcNx-N0slMamG3jPyFlbNURX2IG1q5jBBr1hQgiO-zduhouCZDJIAivQWjwhttps://www.irehr.org/2020/06/04/dangerous-liaisons-some-in-law-enforcement-look-to-militia-groups/https://www.irehr.org/2020/06/04/dangerous-liaisons-some-in-law-enforcement-look-to-militia-groups/https://www.justice.gov/usao-nv/pr/joint-terrorism-task-force-charges-three-men-who-allegedly-sought-exploit-protests-lashttps://www.justice.gov/usao-nv/pr/joint-terrorism-task-force-charges-three-men-who-allegedly-sought-exploit-protests-lashttps://apnews.com/6223153093f08fa910c4ab445771b773https://apnews.com/6223153093f08fa910c4ab445771b773https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1285706/download?utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdeliveryhttps://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1285706/download?utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdeliveryhttps://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/16/us/steven-carrillo-air-force-boogaloo.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/16/us/steven-carrillo-air-force-boogaloo.htmlhttps://youtu.be/qaJv8k65QCEhttps://youtu.be/qaJv8k65QCE

  • 12 Works In Progress July 2020

    The lessons of the Wynoochee River DamLee First

    The era of dam building is over for a reason. Take the Wynoochee River, a tributary of the Chehalis River. The US Army Corps of Engi-neers dammed it in 1970. The gov-ernment promised that the dam would “improve river conditions” for salmon during hot summers. Instead, runs of wild salmon have been decimated and the character of the river has been drastically altered.

    We must remember the lesson of the Wynoochee as the Washing-ton State Department of Ecology compiles and responds to the 5,000 comments it received on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the Proposed Chehalis River Basin Flood Damage Reduc-tion Project, or dam. The Chehalis Basin Board will review Ecology’s comprehensive analysis of the comments at its upcoming July meeting. Within the next year, a fi-nal EIS will be issued. This fall, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will release a National Environmental Policy Act draft (NEPA). As the de-bate rages over constructing a dam on the Chehalis, there is much to learn from mistakes of the past.

    Exploiting a dynamic river The headwaters of the Wynoochee River are in the Olympic moun-tains. One of the larger tributaries of the Chehalis River, the Wynooch-ee is about 60 miles long and joins the Chehalis River between Mon-tesano and Aberdeen. Wynoochee means /xʷʷnúʷʷ/ or “shifting” in the Lower Chehalis language.”

    The Wynoochee Dam sits on the upper Wynoochee River about 52 miles upstream of the Chehalis confluence. Engineers designed the dam to control flooding and to increase the reliable supply of water for current and planned industrial uses. In addition to sup-plying water for two large pulp and paper mills in Aberdeen and Hoquiam, stored water would replace the Chehalis River water

    withdrawn from the now defunct Satsop nuclear plant.

    One of the paper mills, ITT Rayoni-er/International Paper Company,

    closed all operations in 1992 and never reopened. The other—Wey-erhauser Company, shut down in 2005. Six years later, a private equity firm, purchased the former Weyerhaeuser Mill and opened Cosmo Specialty Fibers. Citing a

    decline in product demand brought about by COVID-19 and other reasons, Cosmo temporarily shut down all operations in April 2020.

    In 1994, Tacoma Power built a powerhouse immediately down-stream from the dam. The pow-erhouse generates enough energy to serve a mere 2,100 homes. The Wynoochee Dam has not been a financial win for its owner, the City of Aberdeen. “Aberdeen requested government assistance to prevent bankruptcy from losses due to the dam.

    Impact on SalmonThe Wynoochee offers a lesson. The industrial projects it was built for are gone, it generates little

    electricity. It did not improve the environment for salmon during water releases. in times of low flow. Wild salmon populations in this river have significantly declined since the dam’s completion. The area that is now Lake Wyn-oochee was an important spawning

    area for Chinook salmon. They are gone. Instead of improving condi-tions, the dam blocked 12 miles of excellent mainstem habitat and even more high-quality habitat in the tributaries above the dam. Before the dam, the tributaries and upper 12 miles of river were refugia of cold water—water that could be vital in the face of climate change. Now this water is way too warm, affecting water quality above and below the dam.

    The dam contains no fish passage facilities. Adult wild Coho and

    While it may not be apparent, flooding is essential to a healthy river, especially here in the Pacific Northwest.

    Steelhead going upstream pass the Wynoochee Dam through a trap and haul operation. The few adult wild Chinook salmon are not transported. Downstream juvenile fish passage is allowed during a 45-day run-of-the-river operation each spring when no turbines operate. Juveniles must survive a 175-foot plunge from the reservoir surface into the river be-low. Mortality rates from this plunge vary from 14% to 60%.

    Benefits of natural flow and floodingAll dams alter the hydrograph (flow regime) of rivers, which impacts the habitats and charac-ter of the river for miles down-stream. Wild fish populations that were locally adapted to conditions in the Wynoochee have had to adapt to the new conditions, or perish. Wood, essential for habitat and structure, cannot pass over the dam. Furthermore, a section of the river downstream of the dam is starved of gravel, which is neces-sary for spawning grounds. While it may not be apparent, flooding is essential to a healthy river, espe-cially here in the Pacific Northwest. In addition to delivering wood, the high water moves, sorts, and distributes the gravel required for spawning. High water creates and maintains deep pools and healthy side channels that are juvenile fish nurseries. High water sustains wetlands, recharges groundwater, maintains riparian stream-side forests, and so much more.

    Have we learned the lesson?Above the dam and lake, the upper Wynoochee River is still a river. Here is our lesson: there are deep pools and gravel distributed by high flows, and there are giant logs delivered by storms and floods. This is what a river should look like. Rivers teach us, again and again. Dams kill rivers. The good news is it’s not too late for the Chehalis.

    Lee First is a Twin Harbors Waterkeeper.

    Category (1) Olympia Police Department Lacey Police Department Tumwater Police DepartmentGoverning laws OMC Chapter 2.36 & RCWs LMC Chapter 2.48 & RCWs cited TMC Chapter 2.10.040, 9.00 & RCWs

    Authority to hire/fire City Manager Jay Burney City Manager Scott Spence Mayor Pete Kmet

    Population 52.700 44.000 24.040

    2019-20 Dept. budget (2) $20,961.296 $12,737,107 $15,720,608

    As a percent of general fund 21% (increased from prior year) 24% (increased from prior year) 24% (increased from prior year)

    Bargained contracts (3) Police Sergeants Association Police Management Association One agreement covers both levels

    Police Officers’ Guild Police Officers’ Guild See above

    Total employees 110.5 Unable to discover 42

    Officers 70 53 33

    Salary & CompensationRange of pay 2018 $71,210—$188,530

    (actual amounts paid 2018) Missing $56,460—164,218

    (actual annual amt paid 2018)

    First yr vacation accrual 21 days 12 days 12 days

    Open positions 2020 6 entry level officers 5 officers, 2 admin 3 officers

    Minimum qualifications Age 21, HS grad/GED, WDL, qualify for firearm.

    Age 21, WDL, no felony convictions

    Minimum starting salary $6,592/month $5,832/month $5,420/month

    Initial training 19.5 wks Police Academy Burien Not separately indicated 18 wks Police Academy + 3 mos field

    A comparison of the Olympia, Lacey and Tumwater Police Departments

    (1) Information in this chart comes from city web pages (finance, police department, municipal code) using the most current postings, usually 2018-19 so figures may vary slightly from those in other sources. (2) Different jurisdictions have given police departments a variety of roles not typically under-stood as “policing” and budgets may reflect such differences. (3) Police working conditions and salaries are governed by contracts that are posted on line. The contracts establish base pay for all officers and provide for percentage increases to the base for “premium” and “special” assignment,” incentive bumps for education and fitness, for longevity among other opportunities to exceed base salaries. In addition to other benefits, each contract contains grievance procedures, a “bill of rights” and many, many other stipulations useful for understanding the status of our police. (4) Annually, the Olympi-an posts a “Searchable Salaries” database for cities in Thurston County. The figures here are for maximum and minimum gross actual pay for 2018 for Olympia and Tumwater officers. The data for Lacey 2018 was missing. You can find the agreements with the three cities posted at www.olywip.org.

    Category (1) | Olympia Police Department | Lacey Police Department | Tumwater Police Department

    https://chehalisbasinstrategy.com/office-of-chehalis-basin/https://chehalisbasinstrategy.com/office-of-chehalis-basin/

  • July 2020 Works In Progress 13

    New Traditions Fair TradeCafé & World Folk Artsreal good food always

    www.traditionsfairtrade.com300 5th Avenue SW, Olympia

    360.705.2819

    order carryout from our new menu!

    Check our website for hours and menu

    More than marching: creative support for Black Lives Matter In addition to the vigils, marches and protests taking place daily in the streets and parks of Olympia after the death of George Floyd, groups and organizations throughout our area found ways to make clear that they want the Black Lives Matter movement to continue; to grow and succeed. Here are a few examples of what else happened:

    Grays Harbor Strong In


Contracting that Works - Center for American Progress

Contracting that Works - Center for American Progress

Documents
2012-13 Capital Works Program December Quarter Progress …  · Web view2012-13 Capital Works Program December Quarter Progress Report Subject: 2012-13 Capital Works Program Description:

2012-13 Capital Works Program December Quarter Progress …  · Web view2012-13 Capital Works Program December Quarter Progress Report Subject: 2012-13 Capital Works Program Description:

Documents
Progress Notes - LVHN Scholarly Works

Progress Notes - LVHN Scholarly Works

Documents
Regular and diligent progress of construction works – what

Regular and diligent progress of construction works – what

Documents
Built & In Progress Works

Built & In Progress Works

Documents
Works in Progress #1 -- June

Works in Progress #1 -- June

Documents
Military Transition: Best Practices Industry Challenges, Works in Progress

Military Transition: Best Practices Industry Challenges, Works in Progress

Documents
How Advertising Works (Continued) Lecture 6

How Advertising Works (Continued) Lecture 6

Documents
Gallery: work and works in progress (part one)

Gallery: work and works in progress (part one)

Documents
Creating (non-Works for Queensland) progress reports

Creating (non-Works for Queensland) progress reports

Documents
Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, Vol. 26

Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, Vol. 26

Documents
1.INDUSTRY DAYS WORKS IN PROGRESS - AIC

1.INDUSTRY DAYS WORKS IN PROGRESS - AIC

Documents
Davenport and Anatone Living Snow Fences Works in Progress

Davenport and Anatone Living Snow Fences Works in Progress

Documents
Xanthippe Tsalimi - works in progress

Xanthippe Tsalimi - works in progress

Documents
Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, Vol. 24

Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, Vol. 24

Documents
Works In Progress May 2014 eflip edition

Works In Progress May 2014 eflip edition

Documents
Turning the Tide: Seizing Opportunities: Waterfront Works in Progress

Turning the Tide: Seizing Opportunities: Waterfront Works in Progress

Education
How it works: Glowbase PhD Progress Tracking Platform

How it works: Glowbase PhD Progress Tracking Platform

Education
Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, Vol. 32

Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, Vol. 32

Documents
PROJECTS IN BOISE Works Progress Administration

PROJECTS IN BOISE Works Progress Administration

Documents
2012-13 Capital Works Program December Quarter Progress Report  · Web view2012-13 Capital Works Program December Quarter Progress Report Subject: 2012-13 Capital Works Program Description:

2012-13 Capital Works Program December Quarter Progress Report  · Web view2012-13 Capital Works Program December Quarter Progress Report Subject: 2012-13 Capital Works Program Description:

Documents
  · Web viewWord has it that she is rarely in her room – she’s always visiting others. Wishing you continued progress, Susan. Wishing you continued progress, Susan. FYI, Marnie

  · Web viewWord has it that she is rarely in her room – she’s always visiting others. Wishing you continued progress, Susan. Wishing you continued progress, Susan. FYI, Marnie

Documents
Progress Report and Continued Services Authorization Request

Progress Report and Continued Services Authorization Request

Documents
Florida International University’s Continued Research … Quarterly Progress Report... · Florida International University’s Continued Research Support ... comments, and sent

Florida International University’s Continued Research … Quarterly Progress Report... · Florida International University’s Continued Research Support ... comments, and sent

Documents
Piperack progress marks mechanical works ramp up

Piperack progress marks mechanical works ramp up

Documents
Civil Works Progress

Civil Works Progress

Documents
WPA : WORKS PROGRESS ADMINISTRATION PRINTS FOR CHANGE

WPA : WORKS PROGRESS ADMINISTRATION PRINTS FOR CHANGE

Documents
CSPH Works-in-Progress

CSPH Works-in-Progress

Documents
Social Progress What Works? 2016

Social Progress What Works? 2016

Documents
Muhammad Waqas How Advertising Works (Continued) Lecture 6

Muhammad Waqas How Advertising Works (Continued) Lecture 6

Documents